An utterly classy class of Hall of Famers
Beyond all the inevitable Dirk Discourse on this Substack, it's time to talk about D-Wade, Pau, Tony and Pop
The Dallas Mavericks acquired Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash on the same day 25 years ago. It was such an important moment in my own career that the exact date will stick with me forever: June 24, 1998.
Their arrivals, followed by Mark Cuban buying the team some 18 months later, proved transformative for me as well as the franchise. Traveling with the Mavericks in those days meant that I was embedded with multiple headline-makers who gave my coverage a wider audience than I ever expected when I moved to Dallas to cover what had been a laughingstock franchise throughout the 1990s. That led to freelance opportunities with ESPN that eventually begat a full-time job in Bristol.
So my Hall of Fame coverage this week is naturally going to be Dirk-heavy, as you surely expected, because that's the subject I know the best. I already did a radio interview with Nowitzki on Saturday that generated this Sunday piece and, well, let's just say that I have more on the way.
This, though, is one of the starriest Hall of Fame classes in Hall history and I don't want to slight the other inductees ... especially when so many have San Antonio Spurs ties. I have tracked the Spurs from close range for the last quarter-century, too, because one of the coolest things about The Dallas Morning News when I first joined the paper in April 1997 is how thoroughly it covered the state of Texas in those days. The Mavericks didn't sniff a playoff game until my fourth year in town, but by then I had covered countless Spurs and Houston Rockets playoff games — including pretty much all of San Antonio's run to its first-ever championship in the lockout-shortened 1999 season.
Allow me, then, to shine some spotlight on the other four NBA titans who will be inducted in Springfield on Saturday night alongside Nowitzki: Dwyane Wade, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker and Spurs patriarch Gregg Popovich.
D-WADE
🏀 No less an authority than Heat president of basketball operations Pat Riley declared Tuesday that Wade, who helped Miami win all three of its championships and won an NBA scoring title in 2008-09 to go with 13 All-Star selections, is “the greatest player who ever put on a uniform for us.”
🏀 This one could only come from my pal Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press: Six different players — Eddie Jones, Shaquille O’Neal, Shawn Marion, Jermaine O’Neal, Chris Bosh and LeBron James — were the highest-paid players on Wade’s Heat teams. Wade never held that distinction in Miami.
🏀 Wade averaged 39.3 points per game in Miami’s four victories in the 2006 NBA Finals after the Heat lost the first two games in Dallas to win Finals MVP honors. (That’s despite missing 15 of the 73 free-throw attempts he drew in those four games.)
PAU
🏀 Gasol, drafted No. 3 overall in 2001 by Memphis via Atlanta, is the highest draftee among Class of 2023 inductees. (Wade went fifth overall in 2003, Nowitzki was drafted ninth in 1998 and Parker not until No. 28 in 2001.)
🏀 The Spaniard won two NBA titles in Lakerland alongside his dear friend Kobe Bryant and joins Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett as the only players in league history to register at least 20,000 points, 10,000 rebounds, 3,500 assists and 1,500 blocked shots.
🏀 In one of the most famous trades in NBA annals, Gasol was dealt by the Grizzlies to the Lakers on Feb. 1, 2008, along with a future second-round pick in exchange for Kwame Brown, Javaris Crittenton, Aaron McKie, first-round picks in 2008 and 2010 and the draft rights to a young Spaniard named Marc Gasol.
TONY
🏀 Parker was the first teen-ager in Spurs history, earned six All-Star berths and was a key member of four of San Antonio's five championship teams.
🏀 The Frenchman joins Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James on the short list of players with at least 4,000 career points and 1,000 career assists in the playoffs and ranks as one of only four players (along with Karl Malone, John Stockton and Jason Kidd) to reach the playoffs in 17 consecutive seasons.
🏀 In 2007, Parker became the first of four European players in league history to win Finals MVP honors and was subsequently joined by Nowitzki, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić.
POP
🏀 He's the only coach in NBA history to spend at least 25 seasons with one franchise and will soon begin his 28th season as San Antonio's coach.
🏀 Popovich has won three Coach of the Year trophies and an Olympic gold medal at the Tokyo Games contested in 2021 in addition to his five NBA championships and league-record 1,366 regular-season victories.
🏀 Popovich has been with the Spurs four years longer than the New England Patriots' Bill Belichick and is a frequent story subject on this Substack. Here’s a piece on Pop from December 2021 that feels apt to share as Hall of Fame inductions loom:
The Stein Line is a reader-supported newsletter, with both Free and Paid subscriptions available, and those who opt for the Paid edition are taking an active role in the reporting by providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage of the league. Feel free to forward this post to family and friends interested in the NBA and please consider becoming a Paid subscriber to have full access to all of my posts.
As a reminder: Tuesday editions, on this and every Newsletter Tuesday, go out free to anyone who signs up, just as my Tuesday pieces did in their New York Times incarnation.
Feeling rebellious (and sentimental)
I didn't take many pictures when I was in Las Vegas last week at USA Basketball camp.
Not nearly enough for a photo album.
Yet I was moved to stop for this one snap, after exiting my Uber into the heart of the midday dessert sun, as soon as I caught a glimpse of the venerable Thomas & Mack Center.
I'm guessing you aren't surprised. You've probably heard me rhapsodize numerous times by now about how Nevada-Las Vegas, at the height of its early 1990s powers, was in the same Big West Conference as my beloved Cal State Fullerton.
The old building, as a result, will always be a magical place to me even if they never renovate it ... forever home to Larry Johnson and Plastic Man Stacey Augmon and, of course, Tark.
I've been an NBA snob who largely ignores all college sports — apart from Fullerton matters — for more than three decades now, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one feeling nostalgic about yesteryear's conference alignments given what's happening in college sports today.
Legendary former Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker, now a Substacker like me, can bring far more authority to a piece on the demise of the Pac-12, so I urge you to read him here if you want to be smarter about the crumbling of a conference that has felt inevitable since the news in the summer of 2022 that USC and UCLA were leaving the notion of actual geography behind for the riches of the Big Ten.
It's not a story I'll have much to contribute to ... barring Stanford and Cal shocking the world and snubbing the ACC and the Mountain West to bring some real heft and stature to the 21st Century Big West. But the nostalgist in me will never forget what the Big West used to be, back when UNLV had the feel of an NBA team coming to town whenever the Runnin’ Rebels visited Titan Gym and every school in the standings seemed to have at least one NBA-worthy player on scholarship.
Numbers Game
🏀 1976
Among this weekend's Hall of Fame honorees without NBA ties, I have a particular connection with the 1976 U.S. women's Olympic team. The Montreal Games, for starters, were the first I was really aware of as a kid. The United States won the silver in the first-ever Olympic women's basketball tournament and was coached by Cal State Fullerton legend Billie Moore, included Titans star Nancy Dunkle and also featured an 18-year-old named Nancy Lieberman who became my good friend, Dallas neighbor and television colleague at two different networks. Congratulations to these true trailblazers!
🏀 8
Becky Hammon was a Spurs assistant coach for eight seasons, but her forthcoming Hall of Fame induction stems from her triumphs and successes in a 16-year career as a WNBA star. She played eight seasons for the San Antonio Stars and eight more for the New York Liberty.
🏀 6
Hammon, now head coach of the Las Vegas Aces, was a six-time WNBA All-Star and selected as one of the league's top 15 all-time players in 2011. In WNBA history, Hammon ranks third in free-throw percentage, fourth in 3-point field goals made, sixth in assists, 12th in total points, 14th in games played, 15th in free throws made, 15th in total minutes and 20th in field goals made.
🏀 2
Didn't take long for my hopes to be quashed for something resembling reality to grace our screens in Season 2 of HBO's Winning Time. The first episode of the new season Sunday night presented the preposterous notion of Magic Johnson urging Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to take a bench role on the first day of training camp ... when Kareem, at age 33, was still nine seasons away from retirement and actually went on to average 26.2 points and 10.3 rebounds in 80 games in the real-life version of the 1980-81 season. The new series is also leaning heavily on the idea that Paul Westhead tried to force the high-octane offense he was known for with Loyola Marymount and the Denver Nuggets on the Showtime Lakers ... when in reality numerous players complained about Westhead’s insistence on calling plays from the bench (as described by Scott Ostler in The Los Angeles Times in this 1985 piece) and a “complicated offense that killed the fast break and forced the ball inside to Kareem every time.” That was a persistent storyline after the championship and is oft-cited for sparking the deterioration of Westhead’s relationship with Magic. (Read it here in Kareem’s Substack as well.) I know, I know: I'm just not smart enough to see the inherent brilliance of fictionalizing real people and completely re-writing history because it makes the show so much more entertaining.
🏀 2019
Just four years ago, at the last FIBA World Cup in China, Spain's Ricky Rubio was named tournament MVP. Rubio will miss the 2023 version after announcing that he is taking an indefinite break from basketball "to take care of my mental health." The 32-year-old has two seasons left on his current contract with Cleveland.
🏀 1
Spain enters the World Cup as FIBA's No. 1-ranked team after winning the competition in China four years and winning the EuroBasket title last summer. The Spaniards, however, will not have Rubio or American-born guard Lorenzo Brown, who played a vital role on their EuroBasket-winning team a year ago but is sidelined by injury for the Worlds.
🏀 36
Sadly I did not make it to Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas, on Sunday night to see The Lionel Messi Show in person. I was only going to cover the game if staff photo editor Aaron Stein was also admitted to assemble a photo essay from the match and that credential request was declined by Leagues Cup officials. So I stayed home to watch the game with him and Mrs. Line and missed out on Messi somehow exceeding expectations in the withering North Texas heat. My dear friend Bob Sturm is new to Substack and wrote a tremendous piece after he and his son Justin did make it there to see “his generation's Babe Ruth.” Check it out here:
🏀 97.1
Readers in the Dallas area — or those who want to listen online — can catch me live for an hour on Saturdays talking NBA on 97.1 The Freak. The Saturday Stein Line debuted on July 1 and can be found via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your pods.
Reader Benjamin Hiller just pointed out to me that Bill Russell isn't included in that Pau stat with the blocked shots because they didn't keep track of blocked shots throughout his career. I always need to remember to mention that for Russell and Wilt. A shame we don't have their rejections on record.
Re: D-Wade...
One of my lingering & favorite memories of D-Wade doesn’t really involve any on-court basketball activities, at all.
During his final game in Miami, his son, Zaire, got on the PA system and announced his dad, one last time. When he said, “From Robbins, Illinois...6’4” guard...MY DAD...Dwyane Waaaaaaaaaade,” I got, unexpectedly, a little choked up.
https://youtu.be/t608ZpVQPYw?t=47
Part of it was the acknowledgment, that a career of someone that spanned most of my adult life, was now ending. But, also, it served as a moment for fans to also give thanks to his family for all their sacrifices in sharing their dad with us.
As someone who knows how fleeting life can be with their dads, sometimes it’s easy to see these players just for their exploits on the court. But, the legacy they leave behind at home is far more important to me than what they left on the court.
Here’s to D-Wade’s Hall of Fame Career, as well as all the newest enshrinees in the 2023 Hall of Class. It has been a tremendous privilege to watch their careers from start to finish. 🙌